"Inhabitant of the State" - читать интересную книгу автора (Platonov Andrei)

suffered from diarrhea, because the berries on the shrubbery and the greens
in the gardens ripened. These fruits would drive the stomachs to
nervousness, to which the watery substance from the pond added. To prevent
that public suffering, the young communists from Koz'ma would start to dig
wells each year, but they would become worn down by the power of impassable
sands and would lie on the ground in languish of fruitless labour.
"How could you do all this without proper arrangement?" Pyotr
Yevseyevich would upset himself and rebuke the young communists. "This is
the soil of the State, the State will also give you a drinking well -- wait
automatically, and for now drink the rains! Your work is to plough the soil
within the bounds of your lots of land."
Pyotr Yevseyevich would leave Koz'ma with a certain grief that
citizens lack water, but also with a happiness of expectation that,
therefore, the forces of the State must be coming there and he shall see
them on the way. Moreover, Pyotr Yevseyevich liked to weaken his peace of
mind, as a test, also by devising a small doubt. This small doubt in the
State was on Pyotr Yevseyevich's mind after Koz'ma because of lack of water
in the village. At home Pyotr Yevseyevich would take out an old map of
Austro-Hungary and spend a long time examining it in quiet meditation; he
cared not for Austro-Hungary but rather for a live State outlined by its
borders, a hedged and protected meaning of civil life.
Under a painting of the Battle of Sevastopol, which adorned the warm,
stable dwelling of Pyotr Yevseyevich, there hung a popular map of the
united Soviet Union. Here Pyotr Yevseyevich would observe with more
concern: he troubled himself about the unshakeability of the border line.
But what is a border line? It is a still frontier of a live and faithful
army behind whose backs the bent-down labour peacefully sighs.
In labour there is a meekness of squandered life, but this spent life
is accumulated in the form of the State, and one must love it with an
undivided love, because it is in the State that the life of the living and
of the dead is untouchably preserved. Buildings, gardens and railways --
what are they but a short life of labour captured for ages? Because of
this, Pyotr Yevseyevich was right in feeling compassion not for the
transitory citizens but for their work, petrified in the image of the
State. All the more necessary was it to conserve all labour that was to
become the common body of the State.
"Are there not birds on the millet?" Pyotr Yevseyevich would suddenly
remember with agitation. "They peck at the young seeds, and what would then
feed the population?"
Pyotr Yevseyevich would hurry to the millet field and, indeed, saw the
feeding birds.
"What is going on, oh my Lord God? What will remain whole, if nothing
of good can rest peacefully? These wild elements have exhausted me -- rain,
thirst, sparrows, stopping trains! How can the State live against this? And
yet there are people who are offended at the country: are they real
citizens? They are descendants of the Horde!"
Having driven the birds off the millet, Pyotr Yevseyevich would notice
under his feet a weakened worm that did not manage to follow moisture into
the depths of the earth.
"Now this one exists also, gnawing at the soil!" Pyotr Yevseyevich